Warrior

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Flowerdew's ChargeWarrior was raring for it. It was March 1918 and he was looking up at the German positions at Moreuil Wood, 10 miles from Amiens in Picardy, at the heart of the western front.

The Germans had broken through and the Fifth Army was in ragged retreat. The enemy troops in the wood were reinforcing and digging in. Desperate times called for desperate measures. The cavalry would go in and Warrior would be at its head.

The small, sturdy bay thoroughbred was a legend among the troops, having served at the front since August 1914. He had somehow survived while hundreds of thousands of his human and equine comrades had fallen around him. One group of cavalrymen dubbed him: “The horse the Germans can’t kill.”

On being given the order to charge at Moreuil Wood, Warrior galloped forward, accompanied by a hail of bullets from the enemy as he and the rest of the party crossed no man’s land and rode up the hill towards the Germans. About half the group were hit. “But Warrior cared for nothing,” recalled his rider. “His one idea was to get at the enemy . . . We were greeted by 20 or 30 Germans who fired a few shots before running away, doubtless thinking there were thousands of us following.”

This is not a scene from Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-tipped film version of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse story, which was a theatrical hit both in the West End and on Broadway. It is a true tale involving my grandfather General Jack Seely’s horse Warrior.

The battle of Moreuil Wood was one of the last great cavalry charges. It exacted a terrible cost. Although the allies triumphed they lost a quarter of their men and half of the horses involved. Warrior and Seely survived.

Long after the war Seely recounted the tale of the charger he had bred at home on the Isle of Wight in a book, My Horse Warrior, which was illustrated by Sir Alfred Munnings, the acclaimed artist. It is a tale of courage, run through with the sentiment of the citation that Seely is supposed to have written in recommending Warrior for the Victoria Cross, which read simply: “He went everywhere I did.”

But that was in long-forgotten 1934. Since then the story of Warrior’s war has been left in the memory of those who cherished it at the time — the book ran to five editions — and to the children of the Seely family who heard it, not infrequently, at our mothers’ knees.

Then the War Horse phenomenon began. The play, with its astonishingly lifelike horse puppets, was almost painfully moving but it was still principally a magnificent coup de theatre. It was only when Spielberg took up the challenge of turning it into a film that attention fastened on to how hundreds of thousands of horses were enlisted, like Morpurgo’s fictional Joey, to fight on the western front. The social background of Warrior, the thoroughbred, is the exact opposite to that of Joey, the three-guinea colt bought at auction by a drunken farmer to spite a rival and who was then saved from exploitation by the farmer’s young son Albert.

But inverted snobbery can be just as silly as the other kind and while Warrior may have had grooms and stables and extra riders as distinguished as Sir John French, the army’s early commander-in-chief, he still trotted out every year of the war to where the shells crunched and the bullets flew. His life was charmed but his heart never faltered and his very existence became an inspiration. He was even granted an obituary in The Times in April 1941, an honour not given to many horses. In such circumstances it seemed dumb not to front up and repackage my grandfather’s book. Four reprints and sales exceeding 20,000 with a consistent No 1 position in Amazon’s first world war bestseller list have justified the decision commercially. Just as gratifying is the thrill of revisiting a remarkable story worthy of any fiction.

WARRIOR was a warhorse by breeding. His mother, Cinderella, was bought by Seely after he saw her galloping in the distance on Hampshire Yeomanry manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain in 1902. She was so kind that my mother and her sisters could slide safely down her tail and she was so amenable that Jack used to ride her in Rotten Row, central London, before he went to work in Westminster as a member of the Liberal government alongside his great friend Winston Churchill. When Cinderella had a foal in 1908 by the visiting thoroughbred stallion Straybit, a name like Warrior was always on the cards, especially for an owner who by 1913 was to become secretary of state for war.

Yet while this is much more an Upstairs rather than a Downstairs story, don’t ever think that horse and rider didn’t forge a bond as close as man and animal have ever done. It also had its moments, starting with the first time Seely sat on Warrior as a two-year-old and got bucked off three times in a row, or when they first walked into the sea at Brook on the Isle of Wight’s western shore and capsized in the surf. They were too brave a pair to let that daunt them. Soon Seely wrote admiringly about Warrior, “he would follow the retreating water till the waves were breaking not 10 yards from his nose and then stand with feet well apart while the foamy water swept past his shoulders. It was then that I first realised what a courageous animal was mine, for I could see, though he trembled a little between my legs, that he was to overcome his fear”.

Anyone who has ever ridden will know how easily startled a horse, especially a thoroughbred, can be by something as trivial as a car exhaust backfiring. They will also know the feeling of gratitude and pride when the animal beneath you stands brave in front of danger. Seely would experience this very quickly after war was declared on August 4, 1914. Having lost his ministerial job over the Curragh crisis in March that year he become a special aide to French, the commander-in-chief. Within a week he and Warrior were on a boat to France and within a month there were more than waves crashing in front of them.

Of the retreat from Mons in September 1914, Seely wrote: “It was the first time that I had ridden Warrior under shell fire and we went out through the little gate past the blazing stables. As we approached them, another bouquet of shells fell and burst, the nearest only a few yards away. To my amazement Warrior made no attempt to run away. I could feel him tremble a little between my legs as we trotted through the gate, but he pretended to be quite unperturbed. He was pretending to be brave and succeeding in his task.

“On many, many days thereafter during the four years that were to follow I rode Warrior in shell fire — sometimes so heavy that he was almost the only survivor — but never once did he attempt to bolt or to do any of the things which might be expected of an animal reputed to be so naturally timid as the horse. No, my stout-hearted horse not only kept his own fear under control but by his example helped beyond measure his rider and his friend to do the same.”

The example was soon to spread to a wider group. In February 1915 Seely was put in command of the Canadian cavalry and went with Warrior to join them in Hampshire. By May they were en route back to France and it is clear from the account of the voyage that the horse had already become something of a mascot to the troops.

“I well remember our arrival at Boulogne at 6am on a spring morning,” Seely wrote. “I led Warrior first off the gangway and got on his back sitting there as the men filed off. As they formed up somebody shouted out ‘Three cheers for Warrior’.”

It was an experience that Seely would have to get used to. “This handsome gay bay thoroughbred was my passport wherever I went,” he recalled. “As time went on, especially in France, the men got to love him more and more. As I rode along whether it was in rest billets, in reserve, approaching the line or in the midst of battle, men would say not ‘Here comes the general’, but ‘Here’s old Warrior’.”

At Ypres, the Canadians, to their dismay, were dismounted and stuck in the trenches. Warrior was however, as so often, an exception and, like his mother Cinderella before him, took to walking round behind Seely like a dog. It must have been one of the few amusing sights in a scene dominated by carnage.
Warrior was often at the centre of the devastation. One morning he was tethered just behind the front line when a German shell, instead of bursting into small fragments when it hit the ground, broke in half nearby. One half struck Seely’s brigade major’s horse in the chest and cut it clean in half.

“The orderly [in charge of the horses] was knocked down by the force of the blow and must have been unconscious for a little while,” Seely said. “He was still sitting on the ground when we returned and there was Warrior who had just moved away a few yards and was waiting for me. He neighed loudly as I came in sight and cantered up to me saying quite clearly ‘I would not leave you’.”

At times his ability to dodge the bullets and shells seemed almost supernatural. One day Warrior went lame and Seely rode another horse. A shell hit him and he was killed. Seely recalled: “I had three ribs broken myself, although I did not know it, but my first thought was, ‘What luck it was not Warrior’.” Indeed, what luck. Warrior survived the first day of the battle of the Somme — he and his team were poised behind the line on July 1, 1916 when 20,000 British troops were killed and a further 40,000 injured. Seely lay on the ground holding Warrior’s bridle as the 18-pounder guns boomed overhead. And he came through the strafing of horse convoys by German planes. “On one occasion Warrior was stuck fast in the mud and a German flew down and emptied his machinegun at us; the bullets were very near but not one of them hit us,” Seely said.Evening Standard - Brough Scott

During the march to Passchendaele in 1917, Warrior again sank into the mud. “There were many dead horses lying about which had foundered in the mud and could not be extricated,” Seely wrote. “All of a sudden Warrior went deep in up to his belly. Antoine [Prince Antoine d’Orleans et Braganza, Seely’s impeccably bred aide-de-camp, the great-grandson of Louis Napoleon] was just behind me with Corporal King and another orderly. It was only with immense difficulty that the four of us managed to get him back on to sounder ground. It was a narrow escape.”

For Seely and Warrior the real climax came with that fabled cavalry charge at Moreuil Wood but to survive that far they had to endure other adventures that at times seem almost comical in the telling. These included the ill-fated joint infantry, tank and cavalry attack at Cambrai. As was to be expected, the dynamic duo were up the front behind the leading tank.

“I am sure Warrior enjoyed every minute of it,” Seely said. “Down the main street of Masnières we went together, Warrior’s nose nearly touching the tank. Then misfortune befell the adventure, for with a frightful bang the bridge collapsed and the tank fell through into the canal. Warrior and I nearly fell in too. There was a good deal of rifle fire around and many of the horses behind us were hit but Warrior’s luck held and although he was the leading horse, he escaped without a scratch.”

Further adventures saw Warrior survive when a sniper missed him and killed the horse whose nose he was touching, and when a shell landed on the ruined cottage in which he was stabled. Amazingly, he emerged from the rubble.

Most remarkable of all was when Seely and Warrior, against all convention of the time, led the signal troop to mark the route for the cavalry engagement at Moreuil Wood on March 30, 1918. Such a group would normally contain a junior officer and his horse, not a general on his thoroughbred. But this was Warrior and for all its impetuosity and loss of life of men and horses, the attack did check the German advance.
Indeed, the battle of Moreuil Wood was crucial in checking the Germans’ Ludendorff offensive, their last throw of the dice in an attempt to win the war.

TWO days later Warrior was lame and both Seely’s replacement horses were killed. A year on he took part in the victory parade with the Canadian cavalry in Hyde Park, London. Four years to the day after Moreuil Wood, and now safely in retirement, Warrior won the lightweight race at the Isle of Wight point-to-point under his original groom, Jim Jolliffe, and to the utter delight of his owner:”It was a glorious day. Everyone was pleased. I could not bear to have him led away and we rode home together over the downs rejoicing in this splendid conclusion of an anniversary which neither of us could ever forget.”

By now Warrior had become very much the celebrity, lauded wherever he went whether it was to review troop parades, to war veterans’ rallies, to greet the visiting Queen Mary at tea, to give out sweets at the local Hulverstone school or just to go hunting with the Isle of Wight foxhounds. As so often happens with famous horses — and in my time Arkle and Red Rum have been the greatest examples of this — the animal thrives on the attention, pricking his ears for the cameras, dipping his head to be stroked by his idolaters.

You can swear that is what Warrior was doing when he and Jack Seely made the papers in 1938 trotting outside Jack’s home at Mottistone with their combined ages (30 and 70) making a century. With horses already quite elderly at 20, this is a rare achievement.

They must have been a very special team. Among my grandfather’s papers in Nuffield College, Oxford, is a diary entry from Good Friday 1941. “I do not believe,” he wrote about Warrior’s death the previous week, “to quote Byron about his dog Boatswain, ‘that he can be denied in heaven the soul that he held on earth’.”

Warrior: The Amazing Story of a real War Horse is published by Racing Post Books at £14.99

First published in the Sunday Times on 1st January 2012

Brough ScottBrough will be speaking at CVHF on Sunday, 28th June in ‘WARRIOR: THE REAL WAR HORSE
. He will follow Warrior’s extraordinary journey from birth to his survival through Ypres and the Somme with his grandfather, General Jack Seely. Surviving five years of war, this will be the story of men and horses who fought and died, for ‘God and Country’.

Charlie Hebdo and a Rubicon Moment for Free Speech

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The writers who protested a PEN award chose their side, but most of the group rejected the assassin’s veto.

On balance it would have been awkward if the boycotters of the annual awards dinner of PEN American Center had changed their minds and attended on Tuesday night. At the very least their presence at the literary gathering might have been an unnecessary distraction. At worst it could have been taken as an insult to the memories of the 12 members of the satirical French publication Charlie Hebdo who died on Jan. 7 while exercising their right to free speech.
The heartfelt standing ovation for Gerard Biard and Jean-Baptiste Thoret—who accepted the Freedom of Expression Courage award on behalf of the magazine—had its own eloquence. Unusually, the many writers in the room didn’t need to say anything to make themselves heard. Simply being at the dinner was a statement, a Rubicon moment for those who believe that universal human rights is a cause worth dying for. Just as boycotting the awards has become the rallying event for those who believe that it comes second to other considerations.

If rational argument were a numbers game, there would be no need to continue the discussion about whether PEN behaved correctly in honoring Charlie Hebdo. In the days since 204 writers including Peter Carey, Joyce Carol Oates and Francine Prose—roughly 5% of the membership—signed a letter outlining their objections to the award, criticism of their stance has been unending. From the liberal Nation to the conservative Weekly Standard, the outrage from the majority of the writing community has been unequivocal: Freedom of speech, protected by the First Amendment, is a nonnegotiable right.

After the boycott began, it was met with a thorough demolishing of the claims by its supporters, especially the charge that Charlie Hebdo is racist. Whether through ignorance or malice, this self-appointed committee of public safety insinuated that the magazine’s writers had provoked their own murder by attacking Islam in general, and victimizing French Muslims in particular. Charlie Hebdo’s brand of humor, we were told, “intended to cause further humiliation and suffering.”

That calumny has now been exposed as a lie in point-by-point repudiations by some of the most respected voices in France, including the author Bernard-Henri Lévy andDominique Sopo, the head of SOS-Racisme. The facts are there for all to see, such as: the Hebdo staffers were murdered while planning a conference on antiracism, and only seven of 523 covers for the magazine in the past decade touched on Islam. The protesters can no longer peddle the libel that Charlie Hebdo is a modern-day equivalent of a Nazi propaganda sheet, as several have, including Deborah Eisenberg, whose letter to PEN asked whether it would next be “giving the award retroactively to Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer.”

Yet dragging Nazism into the discussion is useful in one respect. While denouncing the PEN boycott, Mr. Lévy referred to the “deplorable Congress of Dubrovnik of 1933, at which the predecessors of Peter Carey refused to take a position against the book-burnings in Germany.” The Dubrovnik conference, in what was then Yugoslavia, took place on May 10, 82 years ago.

The PEN president at the time, H.G. Wells, tried to maintain neutrality between those who wanted to speak out against Nazism and those who argued that politics had no place in a literary organization. His aim was defeated by the sole American delegate, Henry Seidel Canby, who forced through a resolution crafted by PEN America that restated PEN’s core mission as an advocacy organization.

Because of Canby’s courageous stand, the exiled German playwright Ernst Toller was able to make his own speech the following day—an impassioned plea on behalf of writers suffering Nazi persecution. The German delegation and others walked out. Toller’s speech persuaded the remaining delegates that the organization had to remold itself into the one we know today. Toller, who committed suicide in New York in 1939, declared: “Insanity dominates our age, and barbarity drives humans . . . the voice of humanity will only become powerful if it serves a larger political agenda.”

On Tuesday night, PEN President Andrew Solomon reaffirmed Toller’s position, saying: “PEN stands at the intersection between language and justice.” As the organization recovers from one of the ugliest episodes in its history, the Dubrovnik example offers clarity about what should happen next.

Like its 1933 counterpart, PEN today has decided it will not be neutral in the battle between free speech and the assassin’s veto. It may be that some members will never be fully comfortable with this decision. They should be let go without heartache or second-guessing. There are plenty of other organizations for which the dictates of personal taste, sensitivity and interpretation carry the day.

By awarding Charlie Hebdo the Freedom of Expression Courage prize, PEN has also shown its willingness to lead by example and from the front. That leadership is more important than ever.

If human-rights organizations, starting with PEN, fail to affirm the indivisibility of free speech, that failure will not lead to more peace and harmony in the world. It will lead to the reverse as vigilantes from all sides interpret such weakness as an invitation to impose their own order. The shootings in Copenhagen in February, and in Garland, Texas, last weekend—both involving Islamists targeting events they deemed insulting to their religion—are two examples of how some would like to see the “debate” unfold.

For those who believe in freedom of expression, the moment has come to make the choice between its defense or abandonment against a murderous movement that believes democratic values are subordinate to religious sensibilities. At the end of the evening on Tuesday, I spoke with Jean-Baptiste Thoret, Charlie Hebdo’s film critic. “There are just two options facing us all,” he said, “and we have to take a side.”

This article was originally published in The Wall Street Journal on May 6, 2015

Foreman, AmandaAmanda Foreman is the award-winning historian and internationally best-selling author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and A World on Fire. She won the 1998 Whitbread Award for Biography. In addition to her writing and lecturing, she has served as a judge on almost every major literary prize on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award. She is currently a research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. Her latest book is The World Made by Women with a BBC documentary this spring.

Amanda will be speaking at Chalke Valley History Festival on Sunday, 28 June with a talk entitled ‘The World Made by Women: A History of Womankind’

The Trigger: The Journey That Led The World To War In 1914

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Audio from Tim Butcher’s talk at Chalke Valley History Festival on 28th June 2014.

On a summer morning in Sarajevo a 101 years ago, a teenage assassin fired not just the opening shots of the first world war but the starting gun for modern history. Best-selling author Tim Butcher tells the story of Gavrilo Princip, whose killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand proved so catastrophic that his own story has been largely overlooked.

Spare a thought for the Bomber Boys: The unknown air campaign of 1940

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RAFBristolBlenheimWWIIColourWhilst the troops at Dunkirk struggled to get away from the German onslaught and Fighter Command kept up dawn-to-dusk combat air patrols, spare a thought for the Bomber Boys.

Flying obsolescent aircraft, often without clear objectives, target restrictions and little good intelligence, the aircrew of Bomber Command raided Germany and the Low Countries to both support the tactical objectives and begin the fight back.

RAF Bomber Command had suffered since its inception in 1936 with the original notion that the ‘bomber will always get through’ and an early impression which made it seem that Battle, Blenheim and Wellington would be faster than contemporary fighters and therefore reach their targets even in daylight.

Photo credit: Jarrod Cotter

Designed in 1934, the Bristol Blenheim was the first ‘modern’ aeroplane in the Royal Air Force. A monoplane, constructed with a stressed-skin fuselage and powered by the latest radial engines, it was faster than all British fighters then in service. So fast, was the Blenheim that some models were indeed classed as fighters.

Group Captain (later Air Commodore) A D Panton, renowned Blenheim pilot, shot down three times in the Battle of France, captured PoW – his diaries are Six Weeks of a Blenheim Summer which will feature at CVHF in our Pop Up History programme

Group Captain (later Air Commodore) A D Panton, renowned Blenheim pilot, shot down three times in the Battle of France, captured PoW – his diaries are Six Weeks of a Blenheim Summer which will feature at CVHF in our Pop Up History programme

The first British aircraft to cross the German coast on 3 September 1939 was a Blenheim, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross for Flying Officer McPherson of No 139 Squadron. A Coastal Command Blenheim sank the first U-Boat of the war on 11 March 1940 and by April, French-based Blenheims were mapping the Franco-German border; something which the French had neglected in the 20 years since the Treaty of Versailles.

There was great optimism that the Blenheim would be able to dent any German advance into France.

The reality was different. The losses were huge. The effect was limited.

By early 1940, the deployment of the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitt Bf 109, tested in combat in Spain, had proved that daylight bombing without an overwhelming fighter escort would be prone to higher loss rates than would be sustainable. The Aalborg raid on 13 March 1940 resulted in No 82 Squadron ceasing to exist as 11 out of 12 Blenheims were shot down by fighters or flak – the 12th Blenheim had returned to base early with engine problems. It was the greatest proportionate loss of any military operation in the Second World War – yet still the Blenheim crews climbed into their bombers very day and flew eastwards.

In May 1940, when Germany invaded France, the Hurricane fighters in France fully occupied with air defence by the wasteful tactic of standing patrols – France had no radar and no ground-air coordination – there were very fewer opportunities for close escort to protect the bombers against the Luftwaffe. In consequence, the bomber crews were being asked undertake flights into the unknown.

Read any account of the period – and ‘Six Weeks of a Blenheim Summer’ must be the standard against which others are judged – and the valour of every pilot, navigator and air gunner, as well as those groundcrew often left to fend for themselves, comes over.

Yet, day after day, and increasingly, night after night, bomber crews would fly off into enemy skies and make their contribution. The Blenheim was still in service in Malta and the Far East in late 1941 and still sustaining losses.

Blenheims destroyed invasion barges in the summer of 1940 and undertook perilous missions into German-occupied Europe. Bomber Command’s losses outstripped those of Fighter Command in the period and this contribution as recognised by Winston Churchill who described the Bomber Command aircrew as the Many when praising Fighter Command’s Few.

Lancaster CrewBomber Command will be remembered at Chalke Valley History festival this year with displays by the only flying Bristol Blenheim in the world and the UK’s only flying Avro Lancaster, the iconic British bomber. Paul Beaver will be commenting on the flying and the leading the discussion on Sunday, 28 June with a complete Lancaster bomber crew. It is also hoped that Victoria Panton Bacon, author of Six Weeks of the Blenheim Summer (about her grandfather’s tour of duty in France 1940) will be joining Paul in the commentary box.

War Horse and Private Peaceful: Writing about World War One

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Audio from Michael Morpurgo’s talk at Chalke Valley History Festival on Sunday, 29th June.

Award- winning writer Michael Morpurgo talks on writing about the first world war for young people including Private Peaceful, Medal for Leroy and, of course, War Horse. Its huge success as a book, then a play and then a block-busting film, has made its creator into one of the most successful children’s authors of all time.

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby And The Great Betrayal

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Audio from Ben Macintyre’s talk at Chalke Valley History Festival on Sunday, 29th June 2014.

With access to newly released MI5 files, Ben Macintyre unlocks perhaps the last great secret of the Cold War. A story of intimate duplicity, loyalty, trust and treachery about the most notorious British defector and mole in history, Kim Philby is revealed as agent, double agent, traitor and enigma, and betrayer of secret Allied operations to the Russians.

Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War, 1914

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Audio from Max Hastings’ CVHF talk on Saturday 28th June 2014.

Journalist, editor and acclaimed author Sir Max Hastings tells the story of how Europe went to war in 1914 precipitating the first of the 20th century’s great tragedies. He challenges the view of some modern historians that British participation was unnecessary and concludes with the christmas truces when the struggle had lapsed into the stalemate which was to last the next four years.

The Hunter Who Became A Naturalist

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A century ago, US president Theodore Roosevelt’s year-long African hunting safari was coming to an end. Accompanying Roosevelt on that trip was big game hunter Frederick Selous, who, as Denis Judd explains, helped to put animal protection on the agenda.

America’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, was a politician and statesman who seemed larger than life. His swashbuckling style, his love of sport and outdoor activities, his earlier ‘rough rider’ military exploits, and his capacity to grab the headlines made him immensely popular with the mass electorate and the newly emerging mass newspaper readership – especially within the English-speaking world. Yet toward the end of his second term as president, in 1908, he declined to run for the White House again, and more or less handed the next election to his close friend William Howard Taft.

Not that ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt proposed to slip quietly into the shadows of history. As soon as his successor had been inaugurated, he set off for Africa in order to hunt big game and to acquire specimens for the Smithsonian Institute. Cynics suggested that the trip was undertaken not merely to give Taft a free hand, but to promote the ex-president’s manly image in a new and exotic environment.

Landing at Mombasa in April 1909, accompanied by his son Kermit, Roosevelt set off on safari, leading over 200 porters and guides through what was then British East Africa, entering the Belgian Congo and following the Nile north to Khartoum in the Sudan.

Young Frederick SelousOne of the Roosevelts’ companions was Frederick Selous. British, but of French Huguenot origins, Selous had a reputation for killing big game. That Roosevelt saw Selous as the archetypal hunter is clear: “Mr Selous is the last of the big game hunters of Southern Africa; the last of the mighty hunters whose experience lay in the greatest hunting ground which this world has seen since civilised man has appeared.”

Roosevelt left various accounts of his hunting exploits, and as one reads them it is possible to see how many of his contemporaries must have been thrilled by the descriptions of tracking, confrontation and bloody death – death that is, for the animals, and a few dramatic maulings for the occasional unfortunate accompanying ‘native warrior’. No wonder that more and more rich Britons and Americans were attracted to this costly form of outdoor theatre, that would reward them not only with the respect of their peers but would also adorn their mansions with the heads of magnificent beasts.

Frederick Selous, however, was far more complex than many of his contemporary trophy-seekers, despite having hunted in Bavaria, Transylvania, Scotland, Sardinia, Norway, Turkey, Persia, the United States and Canada. Even as a ten-year-old at public school in England he had expressed a precocious ambition to be a hunter, once telling a housemaster who chided him for sleeping on the floorboards of his dormitory: “Well, you see, one day I am going to be a hunter in Africa and I am just hardening myself to sleep on the ground.” He had arrived in Southern Africa as a young man of 19, fervently interested in the natural world, exploration, local cultures and, almost as an afterthought, the extension of British rule.

Having acted as a guide in Cecil Rhodes’ pioneering and conquering advance north across the Limpopo river, in 1893 Selous was awarded the Founder’s medal of the royal Geographical society for his explorations in and scientific reports from ‘Zambesia’,which is essentially modern Zimbabwe.

Having helped found in 1907 the Shikar Club, a big game hunters’ association that met regularly and in luxurious surroundings in London’s Savoy hotel, Selous had also acquired the reputation as an inventive and skilled rifleman, or ‘shot’. in particular he was admired during his early ivory hunting career for having killed an astonishing 78 elephants from
1874–76 with a huge 13-pound muzzle-loading gun that fired a quarter pound bullet. Later, however, Selous favoured the new, slimmer, single shot rifles, like the .450 Nitro express.

Selous And RooseveltHowever, well before Selous chose to accompany Roosevelt on his 1909 safari, he was beginning to have grave doubts as to the wisdom of allowing the unlimited killing of african game. This had probably originated in self-interest as when, in 1881, he gave the view that every year elephants were “becoming scarcer and wilder south of the Zambezi” and that it was becoming “impossible to make a living by hunting at all”. He had good reason to feel concern. During the late Victorian and early Edwardian ages, many big game hunters went to Africa to collect trophies, savour the open-air life and perhaps to find fame and fortune. certainly there was a stream of books published during these years, containing vivid accounts, with photographs, of hunting exploits in Africa, and beyond.

Despite Selous’ continuing predilection for hunting, however, he also became much more seriously concerned about the need to preserve a sustainable balance in the world of nature, the necessity of recognising new species and the task of ensuring that organisations like the Natural History museum in South Kensington had the best possible collections. It has been estimated that he donated over 5,000 plant and animal specimens to this museum. Nor is there evidence, especially in his later years, that he killed game simply to chalk up an impressive tally rather than to advance knowledge.

He was, in fact, a ‘hunter-naturalist’ rather than simply a big game hunter. This far more creative identity was recognised in various ways, apart from the award of the Founder’s medal. For example, both a species of mongoose and a sub-species of antelope were named after him. More significant perhaps was the naming after him of the Selous Game reserve in south-east Tanzania, recently designated a World Heritage site in recognition of the diversity of its wildlife but also as a tribute to the safe haven it provides.

Selous remained a committed collector of wildlife specimens right up to his death in action in German East Africa in 1917, fighting the enemy by day and catching insects in his butterfly net in the evenings.

It was an irony that Selous was shot in the territory that now contains the wildlife park named after him, a huge nature reserve that sought to preserve life over death. Yet his demise had a neat symmetry in that, in 1896 under German colonial rule, the German governor had already declared an area roughly the same as today’s Selous Game reserve to be free of hunting and dedicated to natural preservation. The German authorities went on to enact a number of Wildlife conservation Laws for their African possessions and to promote various policies aimed at sustaining the balance of nature.

So Selous was not a lone pioneer in this benevolent process, though his international fame made him one of its most powerful advocates. Indeed the Roosevelt expedition of 1909 may also have marked a modest turn in the tide, with the idea of the ‘safari’ – with its subsequent implications of exploration, travel and observation, as well as hunting – setting a different tone to that of a single-minded, unbridled, macho slaughter of wildlife.

Teddy Roosevelt wrote on hearing of Selous’ death: “He led a singularly adventurous and fascinating life, with just the right alternatives between the wilderness and civilisation… He added much to the sum of human knowledge and interest… Who could wish for a better life or a better death, or desire to leave a more honourable heritage for his family and his nation?”

This article was first published in BBC History Magazine, March 2010.

Denis JuddDenis Judd has been Head of History, and is now Professor Emeritus of Imperial and Commonwealth History, at the London Metropolitan University. On Monday, 22nd June, he will be speaking at Chalke Valley History Festival about ‘Gandhi’s Return to India 1915: The Beginning of the End for the British Empire.’

Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

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Audio from Jung Chang’s talk at Chalke Valley History Festival on Saturday, 28th June 2014.

In this talk, best-selling author of Wild Swans, Jung Chang gave a panoramic depiction of the birth of modern china and an intimate portrait of the most important woman in Chinese history. One of the emperor’s concubines, she launched a palace coup to become the Empress Dowager Cixi, the absolute ruler of a third of the world’s population who overcame huge obstacles to bring a medieval empire into the modern age.

The Dreyfus Affair

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Audio from Robert Harris’ talk at Chalke Valley HIstory Festival on Saturday, 28th June 2014.

In this talk, best-selling author Robert Harris turns to one of the key scandals in French history, the Dreyfus Affair. Discussing this infamous miscarriage of justice that rocked France in the years before the first world war, he brings new insights to this world of secret service dealings, cover-ups and betrayal…